To vote against Marine Le Pen by voting for Emmanuel Macron does not mean voting for the latter's manifesto. It is a vote to defend democracy itself as a forum for disagreement, crossed by divergent interests and conflicting causes. A place where democracy's contradictions, pluralism, diversity, demands and hopes can be freely expressed – including when faced with the policies of a Macron presidency.
It would be nothing like that under the far right, whose election manifesto, ideological inheritance and political practices Mediapart has documented enough to know that its demagogic and lurid posturing includes an explicit desire to challenge our common Republican values – imperfectly as they are fulfilled – of freedom, equality and fraternity. Without hesitation, and to the extent that we have a choice, we prefer to be in opposition to a Macron presidency than subject to a nationalist, authoritarian and identitarian government.
As we recently reminded readers, Marine Le Pen is not on the side of the workers, employees, the exploited and the oppressed, the weakest and most fragile. She is even their most determined opponent, so keen is she to dissolve social conflicts – class struggle – into one vague mass of people rallied around the nation and who submit to its leader. This is all the more true given that the xenophobic and racist commitment of her party – with its “national priority” - makes the diversity of the world of work, forged by flows of migration and different cultures, its number one enemy.
We do not confuse the economic violence and social injustice under a democracy, however imperfect it is, with that which exists under an authoritarian government. In the former case one is still able to fight, rally people, build up a power base and even force the government back down. Under the latter this right to oppose and resist will be challenged, with all the means of coercion available to the state and its police. Anyone thinking that there could be any comparison between these two situations lacks a memory and has forgotten history.
Who called for the banning of demonstrations against the employment law brought in under prime minister Manuel Valls? Marine Le Pen! Who is considering monitoring the freedom of the press? The Front National! Who wants to undermine the right to strike, the right of those whose labour is their only source of power against owners, shareholders and capital? The very same party.
For example, after Marine Le Pen's very brief visit to the threatened Whirlpool factory at Amiens in northern France, it was not pointed out enough (apart from here) that the members of the picket line that she met there would have trouble forming such a picket under her proposed laws. One of the Front National's manifesto pledges is for a “major trade union reform” so that unions are “more likely to enter into the logic of constructive consultation and less tempted to resort to trials of strength (strikes, demonstrations) to make up for their lack of legitimacy”.
So the worker-friendly language that the far-right candidate uses, diving into the political space left vacant by the divisions, silences and political calculations of the radical left, is clearly just a a pose. It is similar to the way that, during the 1930s, the National Socialists profited from the socialists and communists on the Left tearing themselves apart to rally the German working class to their cause, before systematically destroying its social movement, its organisations and its unions.
This is what is at stake in the second round on May 7th, and faced with this we have no other choice than to vote for Emmanuel Macron. We have even less choice given that an electoral accident is more possible than ever, a coming to power through a democratic vote of a force that is fundamentally anti-democratic. For the Front National candidate to win it, all it would take is a major shift of voters on the Right to Le Pen and a strong turnout of those on the far right, coupled with voters on the Left staying home in large numbers, as a result of anger, splits or weariness, thus boosting the number of abstentions to the detriment of Emmanuel Macron.
Stating that this risk exists is in no way blackmailing people into voting pragmatically. It is, more fundamentally, a commitment to the path of a clear-eyed reconstruction and significant coming together of the forces of emancipation, in contrast with the resignation, turmoil and confusion which have for so long played into the hands of the Front National. For we must no longer content ourselves with words and remain intoxicated by our anger: we're facing a political disaster in the form of a race to the bottom of the abyss, something for which many are responsible, with pyromaniac firefighters from the Right and Left having long played the leading role. They have been joined in the home straight by the sorcerer's apprentices, most of them so caught up in their own personal adventures that they forget that they are always short-sighted, building nothing lasting with regard to our shared democratic culture.
It is something of an understatement to say that we were warned. In January 2015, delivering a verdict on the first half of François Hollande's presidency in a series of collective writings, Mediapart stated in the opening lines: “France is at the mercy of an historic accident: the election to the presidency in 2017 of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. This is not a forecast, a prediction, still less is it a bet. It simply stems from a cool analysis of the unprecedented scale of the crisis in political representation, of the weakening of our democracy, of the exhaustion of proposals inside the Republican Right as well as on the governmental left and the radical left. Yes, this major political malfunction makes this electoral accident possible.”
Pyromaniac firefighters and sorcerer's apprentices
We have arrived at that point and, alas, how little our warnings have been heeded. But we could never have imagined the extent to which this presidential campaign, where nothing has gone as predicted by the leader writers, experts and pollsters, would confirm this clear-sighted warning. We have a Right that is in a mess having subjected itself to a candidate – François Fillon - who was morally disqualified and who, as it happens, continually radicalised his electorate, to the point where Fillon's defeated conservative rival Alain Juppé has now himself raised the alarm and warned people to vote “no” in the face of disaster. We have a Left, meanwhile that is vanishing and fragmented, incapable of the smallest unified initiative, while its dominant party of the past, the Socialist Party, seems to have disappeared.
In contrast we see a belligerent and united far right imposing its rhythm to the point where it is systematically and effectively setting the agenda for the campaign between the two rounds of voting. But opposite them we have a radical left that has been paralysed by the abrupt absence of the usual anti-fascist discourse of its spokesperson, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, right up to his appearance on TF1 television on Sunday April 30th. As a result his La France Insoumise ('Unbowed France') movement has been plunged into confusion and doubt. Finally, we have a candidate, “from the Right and the Left” as Emmanuel Macron likes to put it himself, who has not grasped the gravity of the moment, who believes he has won in the manner of a casino gambler who has cleaned up on a single throw of the dice.
There is an old proverb that runs “You made your bed, now lie in it”, a means of reminding people that, inevitably, they have to suffer the consequences of their own acts. The first people responsible for this disaster are the pyromaniac firefighters who for years have espoused the ideological agenda and mindset of the far right, claiming that this would reduce their impact whereas in fact it has just reinforced them. They come from both Right and Left. In 2002 President Jacques Chirac did nothing with the mandate he obtained in his election win over Jean-Marie Le Pen, other than to bring Nicolas Sarkozy back into the national political arena. In 2005 Sarkozy and François Hollande, then head of the Socialist Party, cheerfully trampled over the “no” vote that won the referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. This then handed the initiative to the backward-looking aspect of the vote, that of a feeling of exclusion and national introspection, rather than to the vote's more progressive social and democratic demands.
In 2007 President Nicolas Sarkozy hastened to give legitimacy to the Front National's obsessions over the issue of identity, setting up a new Ministry for National Identity and Immigration, one of whose ministers from 2009 to 2010 was former socialist MP Éric Besson. In 2012 François Hollande, who was elected president thanks to a mood that rejected the brutality and stigmatisation of the previous presidency, not only did nothing, he chose to follow the same backwards and blind approach with the promotion of Manuel Valls, who embodied an authoritarian, anti-egalitarian and and identitarian headlong rush; to ruin, it has to be said. All these professionals of a rootless and remote politics, shut away in an economic and state bubble, were unwilling to see the country's profound expectations, the calls for democratic renewal and urgent social action.
To the arrogance of these pyromaniac firefighters one can add the lack of awareness of the sorcerer's apprentices, more preoccupied by themselves than by the gravity of the moment. The main one is Emmanuel Macron who, charged with leading the Republican challenge in the second round, has shown himself to be lightweight and superficial after his first-round victory on April 23rd. It is high time that he thinks against himself, as he was invited to do by a very pertinent question from Mediapart (see Mathieu Magnaudeix's blog here), who back in early March highlighted the challenge Macron would face in a second-round duel with Le Pen. Macron does not own the votes he received on April 23rd nor will he own those he will get on May 7th, as they are cast as much from calculation as they are from conviction.
If Macron does not understand that this election is bigger than him, confusing his plans and shaking his certitudes, he is heading for disaster, both now and in the future. To claim a mandate for his policies, to chase after a “presidential majority”, to plan to rule by government orders, to settle for yet another law on morals and behaviour in public office, all this marks a failure to hear the democratic demands that are coming from the country. And if there is anything at stake in a vote for him on May 7th, it is to make him understand afterwards that he is merely the custodian of a collective will.
But there is another sorcerer's apprentice, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Like others who have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, he has managed to transform an undeniable collective success – in the first round his France Insoumise ('Unbowed France') came far ahead of the Socialist Party – into a personal defeat. Bringing together a number of the ideas and experiences for which Mediapart has since 2008 been the intersection, his formidable campaign and the manifesto which was its framework are now coming up against the limits, the quirks and the ambiguities of the way he practices politics. Sectarianism, exclusivity and intolerance have never served the ideals of emancipation, equality and fraternity. On the Left there has never been one bearer of the true cross who is justified in excommunicating anyone who contradicts them or who dissents. Mélenchon's success will be just a short-lived illusion if it doesn't take into account the overall balance of power, which is profoundly unfavourable to a Left today which is more divided and in more of a minority than ever. And unless the movement agrees to take part in the Left's reconstruction through a dialogue with all its other constituent parts.
Back in the distant past – the 1930s – Leon Trotsky was the only one to explain, through education, realism and patience, how Stalinist sectarianism and the divisions of the Left paved the way for the extreme right in Europe. To invoke him, as mathematician Michel Broué has on Mediapart (see here and here) - “Against fascism Trotsky was ready to ally himself with the devil and his grandmother” - is not some posture of the enlightened but simply a reminder of the painful lessons of history.
“If we rightly accuse social democracy of having paved the way for fascism, our task must in no way consist of shortening this road to fascism,” wrote this 'prophet disarmed' in August 1931. This text, entitled 'Against National Communism!', is a timely reminder that faced with the followers of hate of others and foreigners, any complacency towards a retreat into nationalism is not a barrier against them but, on the contrary, becomes their springboard.
In 1933 the writer André Malraux met Leon Trotsky, who was temporarily taking refuge in Saint-Palais, near Royan on France's Atlantic coast. “The sea,” Malraux said, “continued to pound the rocks as the night advanced.” And it was then that the former head of the Red Army, murdered seven years later on Stalin’s orders, confided in him that which sums up our duty, which is both a civic and journalistic duty: “You see, the important thing is: to see things clearly.” To see clearly is indeed, as Trotsky explained, to “liberate man from all that prevents him from seeing”.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter